Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4

Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio 4 is a freely available .NET-based programming environment for building robotics applications. It can be used by both professional and non-professional developers as well as hobbyists.

Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio 4 enables hobbyists and professional or non-professional developers to create robotics applications targeting a wide range of scenarios. This release is an update that has the functionality of the previous RDS 2008 R3 Standard Edition with the addition of support for the Kinect sensor and a defined Reference Platform, also referred to as MARK (Mobile Autonomous Robot using Kinect).

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio can support a broad set of robotics platforms by either running directly on the platform (if it has an embedded PC running Windows) or controlling the robot from a Windows PC through a communication channel such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth®.

In addition to providing support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 provides a Visual Programming Language (VPL) which allows developers to create applications simply by dragging and dropping components onto a canvas and wiring them together.

To help developers getting started, Robotics Developer Studio contains extensive Documentation and a large set of samples and tutorials that illustrate how to write applications ranging from simple "Hello Robot" to complex applications that simultaneously run on multiple robots.

Robotics Developer Studio requires Windows 7.
In addition to using Robotics Developer Studio as a stand-alone development environment, it can be used with any of the Visual Studio 2010 Editions, including the Express Edition. Note that you should install Visual Studio before Robotics Developer Studio so that the New Service Wizard installs correctly.

To save the download to your computer for installation at a later time, click Save. (Recommended)

To cancel the installation, click Cancel.

Answer the prompts. Note that the CCR and DSS Runtime will be installed first as well as some pre-requisites. RDS requires .NET 4.0 but does not install it because this comes with Visual Studio. If you want to remove RDS later, you must also remove the CCR and DSS Runtime afterwards.

When the installation is complete, look in the Start Menu under Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 and run Build All Samples. This is a separate manual step that takes several minutes.

RDS 4 is an upgrade to RDS 2008 R3, but it install into a separate folder. If you already have RDS 2008 R3, then RDS 4 will install side-by-side. However, the Security Model for RDS 4 is different. Please read the Release Notes for more information.
For an overview of RDS 4 see the Datasheet.